Stop Killing Games: where the fight to keep bought games playable stands
On 14 December 2023, Ubisoft pulled The Crew from sale and announced it would switch off the game's servers. On 31 March 2024 it did. The Crew had no offline mode, so every copy stopped working, boxed discs included. More than 12 million people had played it.
Ross Scott, the YouTuber behind Accursed Farms, started Stop Killing Games in response. The campaign asks for one thing: if you sell a game, you can't make it unplayable when you stop supporting it. Two and a half years later, it has reached the European Commission, the UK Parliament and the California legislature. None of them has passed a law yet.
What the campaign asks for
Scott says the campaign doesn't want publishers to run servers forever. Speaking to the BBC, he said companies "can end it any time they want". The demand is an end-of-life plan: patch the game so it runs offline, or release the server software so players can host it themselves.
The industry disagrees. Video Games Europe, which speaks for many of the largest publishers, told the BBC that shutting down online services "must be an option" once a game stops paying for itself, and warned that the proposals would make online games more expensive to build.
The European Union: no law, a code of conduct instead
The campaign's European Citizens' Initiative, "Stop Destroying Videogames", collected nearly 1.3 million signatures. The organisers handed it in in January 2026, and the European Parliament held a public hearing in April.
The Commission answered on 16 June 2026. It said it can't, at this stage, propose a legal duty to keep games playable after sales end, and pointed to copyright and other intellectual property rights as the main obstacle. It also argued that existing consumer law already protects buyers: sellers have to state how long a service will run, and the Digital Content Directive gives you a remedy, up to a proportionate refund, when a game stops earlier than the contract or your reasonable expectations allowed.
The Commission made two promises. By the end of 2026 it will open talks with publishers and consumer groups on an industry code of conduct for ending a game's life. And it will report, also before the end of the year, on how the Digital Content Directive works in practice. A code of conduct would be voluntary.
The United Kingdom: a debate, no change
A UK petition passed 100,000 signatures, which earned it a debate in Parliament. Ministers said they had no plans to change consumer law and that game sellers must follow the rules that already exist.
California: one committee vote short
California's Protect Our Games Act, AB 1921, would have required publishers to warn players before switching off a service a game needs, and then either keep the game playable with a patch or offline version, or refund it. The State Assembly passed it 43 to 16 in May 2026. On 29 June it stalled in the Senate's Business, Professions and Economic Development Committee: 4 members voted yes, 3 voted no, and 4 didn't vote, which left it short of the majority it needed. The committee granted reconsideration, but deadlines mean the bill can't come back before the 2027 session (TechSpot).
The courts
Two The Crew players sued Ubisoft in California. Ubisoft argued that buyers get a licence to use a game, not ownership, and the plaintiffs withdrew the case in June 2025. In March 2026 the French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir took Ubisoft to court over the same shutdown, arguing that players were misled about how long their purchase would last and that some contract terms were unfair. We found no reported ruling in that case as of October.
Meanwhile, the fans
Players didn't wait for a law. A group led by whammy4 built The Crew Unlimited, a server emulator that stands in for Ubisoft's servers. Its 1.0 release arrived in September 2025, and updates still land: version 1.4.6.0 came out on 17 September 2026. You need your own copy of The Crew on PC; the project doesn't host any game files.
That's the pattern across this site. If a publisher leaves no end-of-life plan, volunteers write one, from fan-run multiplayer servers to OldUnreal's long upkeep of Unreal. The campaign's argument is that you shouldn't need them.
Sources: BBC News, European Commission, TechSpot, GamingOnLinux, The Crew Unlimited, Stop Killing Games.